ANSWERS: 4
  • "Their standards are too low." Basically, it was a humorous line to point out how "base" a person he wanted to be perceived to be.
  • That his standards were higher than his own actions could sustain.
  • Man, do I love the Marx Brothers... but I feel that the other answers to this question are excellent. If the club wanted him for a member, it obviously didn't have very high standards.
  • 1) "A few nights later the club had a banquet. I don't clearly remember what the occasion was. I think it was to honor one of the members who had successfully managed to evade the police for over a year. The dining tables were long and narrow, and unless you arrived around three in the afternoon you had no control over who your dinner companion was going to be. That particular night I was sitting next to a barber who had cut me many times, both socially and with a razor. At one point he looked slowly around the room, then turned to me and said, "Groucho, we're certainly getting a lousy batch of new members!". I chose to ignore this remark and tried talking to him about Chaucer, Ruskin and Shakespeare, but he had switched to denouncing electric razors as a death blow to the tonsorial arts, so I dried up and resumed drinking. The following morning I sent the club* a wire stating, Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member." Telegram to the Friar's Club of Beverly Hills to which he belonged, as recounted in Groucho and Me (1959), p. 321" Source and further information: http://books.google.com/books?id=oxNlAAAAMAAJ&q="At+one+point+he+looked+slowly+"&dq="At+one+point+he+looked+slowly+"&ei=qFE5StDBBqGOyQSUj4jFAw&pgis=1 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx 2) "Aggregaphobia: Who likes being categorized, unless the category flatters them in a way that agrees with their soul’s sense of who and what they are? Woody Allen famously said* (in the great Annie Hall), “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”. I see that statement (do they get any more ironic than that?) as a twisted corollary to Category Error Discomfort (let’s call it CED), which is what we sometimes feel under labels others give us, even when the label isn’t wrong." "As Dr. Weinberger points out below, Woody was actually quoting Groucho Marx." Source and further information: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/02/10/aggregaphobia/

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